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Or 16 Liaoning moves out, too.
CV-17 Shandong (002 carrier) Thread I ...News, Views and operations
- Thread starter Jeff Head
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chinese Carrier Vessel number 1 = CV 001, Type 001, hull-number 16 Liaoning
chinese Carrier Vessel number 2 = CV 002, Derivat of Type 001 = Type 001 A, hull-number unknown, suspected to become 17 Shandong
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This reminds me of similar purges back when Stalin was in power in the Soviet Union. I think they called anyone who was working on a project deemed unworthy by the central government 'wreckers'. Tupolev was arrested in this time period because of his continual failures to produce a modern heavy bomber design and Korolev was arrested for working on rocket airplanes. Thankfully for the Soviets, however, they did not sentence Tupolev to death. They just put him into a prison labor workshop.
This might indicate the central government either wants to downscope efforts in the aircraft carrier program so is setting up these people as failures in the court of public opinion. Or it could also be that they expected faster results at this point in time. However this does not bode all that well. These kinds of purges are typically done by totalitarian regimes just before a reorganization pending a major looming military conflict. I hope I am not reading too much into this.
This might indicate the central government either wants to downscope efforts in the aircraft carrier program so is setting up these people as failures in the court of public opinion. Or it could also be that they expected faster results at this point in time. However this does not bode all that well. These kinds of purges are typically done by totalitarian regimes just before a reorganization pending a major looming military conflict. I hope I am not reading too much into this.
You are reading too much into it.
similar to what I wrote here -- https://www.sinodefenceforum.com/chinese-shipbuilding-industry.t2294/page-58#post-536680 -- there is nothing in the article that suggests anything related to the aircraft project was involved.
The problem is that just because high level CSIC individuals are being arrested and investigated, SCMP are saying it is related to the aircraft carrier project simply because the aircraft carrier project (or Liaoning and 002/001A at any rate) are under CSIC. However, CSIC is a big company and it's misleading to simply refer to it as the "aircraft carrier company" as SCMP has done so, and there's no convincing information at this stage to suggest that there was info specifically related to the carrier project beyond SCMP's "sources".
To me it seems like your standard corruption and bribery case at this stage, and while there could be military intelligence leakage involved in it, I would be surprised if such information would be indicated publicly.
I don't think there's any indications to suggest that the reasons for investigating these individuals is due to "continual failures".
Merely demoting them would be more than enough if it were simply a matter of failure or incompetence.
There's also no indication that the carrier programme will be downsized, as the latest rumours seem consistent in that the PLAN will still be pursuing multiple carriers in coming years.
There's nothing wrong with speculation, but the direction you've taken doesn't make sense and is inconsistent with what we know about PLAN carrier ambitions and the way Chinese govt deals with incompetence.
Things have changed since Xi came to power and turned the regime into a personality cult.
There's been greater concentration of power but I see no pattern of the kind of actions that you've described.
Under Xi there's been much more action against perceived corruption of course, and one could argue which cases are legitimate corruption and which cases are made for political reasons, however what you're describing is removing incompetent people through the use of CCDI which would just be silly.
There should easily be mechanisms in place to remove people at heads of research and industry institutes if they are merely incompetent. Making up false charges of corruption would be needless in that case.
So yes, things have changed a little under Xi, but not by that much and calling Xi's leadership a personality cult is the kind of English language media exaggeration made by people who aren't aware of what the standard level of "personality cult" for most Chinese leaders are (Xi's is slightly greater by comparison) but who have no idea what true personality cult leadership like Mao's was like.
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